Hi there. I was a Noogler in 2005 or so, but it sounds like things haven't changed much, at least on that side.
Regarding the stuff you're not supposed to talk about, there are three stages:
1. Amazement at how it all works; wanting to go run and tell all your friends.
2. Fear that talking about Google's advantages would undermine the company (or your position in it)
3. Recognition that nobody would believe you anyway.
By the time you've reached (3) you've come to believe that Google is years ahead of anyone else; you've transferred all loyalties to the company; you accept the idea that you're in an elite of humanity.
The reality is that while Googlers are very smart, and sometimes not even narrow, a lot of their intellectual qualities are not innate. Mostly it's due to a very severe work ethic and having had the leisure and wealth to pursue a field with single-minded focus since they were in their early teens. And much of this is mere bravado, or habitual oneupmanship learned from Ivy-league American schools. Don't be intimidated, and try not to abandon all your own intellectual standards in favor of Google's.
Alright, I'll bite. We've all worked with really bright individuals before.
What magically transformative thing happens when they become the average that would be so incredible and unbelievable to non-googlers?
I would describe CS grad school as having "really bright people" as the norm, but while pretty cool, I would never deign to think it as incomprehensible to outsiders or that "nobody would believe [me] anyway".
Are you guys just enjoying some hyperbolic kool-aid or is there really some new breed of uber-man filling the halls of Google?
What's the big deal (sincerely, not sarcastically)?
In my experience, Google employees individually are not much smarter or more productive than what you'd find in a top-tier computer science department or successful startup. Google's engineering reputation comes from having 20,000 of them, all with access to the same code & information, similar cultural values, and mostly aligned goals.
It's a critical mass problem. One smart person is a useful open-source library. Ten smart people is a successful startup. Twenty thousand smart people is Google.
There're certain efficiencies of scale that you can get with twenty thousand employees that are all empowered to work together. You get more specialization, so your UI designer is really good, and your UI engineer is really good, and your toolsmith is really good, and your backend algorithms person is really good, and the whole product benefits from that. You get the cross-pollination of ideas that occurs when smart people get together over food in a relaxed atmosphere. And you get the accumulated infrastructure built from having ten years of really smart people working on hard problems.
The network organization tends to eliminate the biggest problem that other tech companies have: scale. Typically, you eventually get a dumb middle manager placed on top of a bunch of smart programmers, and the whole group drops to the level of the weakest link. By empowering people to reach out across the organization to whoever's the best person for the task, regardless of the org chart, you can route around weak links. The organization starts being defined by its best performers instead of its worst performers.
Something else I read someplace (so it must be true!) is that Google has maniacally strict rules about what programming languages are allowed and that everything must go into company-wide version control. If that's true, and if they also have good code-conventions, I can see how that would have a magnifying effect on productivity and technology improvement.
I'd still like to someday understand what makes Google qualitatively different from other companies.
Because I don't think 20k smart engineers necessarily yields a functional company nor is immediate access to the top levels always a good thing (for obvious reasons).
The people that are working there aren't just the most brilliant in the world, they literally invented a good portion of the internet, computers, computer science, and programming as we know it. They have "the father of the internet" (Vint Cerf), the creator of Vim (Moolenaar), the creator of Python (Guido), the lead developer of Firefox (Goodger), several of the lead Linux kernel developers, the creator of memcahced (Fitzpatrick), Ken Thompson and Rob Pike (both notable for several things), and hundreds of other developers that have already proven their worth (Peter Norvig and Jeff Dean come to mind).
These aren't just smart people, they're smart people who have changed the world.
To put it into context, one day I'm sitting in a meeting and someone says "Mike is working on an algorithm for that." Another person asks, "Burrows?", to which the first person says "Yea." They were talking about Mike Burrows, as in the guy who created the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (among other things). Names of people that have had major impacts like this are routinely brought in casual conversation. It's like working in a programming mecca. The crazy thing is, even the names you wouldn't recognize have most likely had substantial impacts as well.
As for critical mass, Google has it. I was standing in a hallway one day reading stats about search traffic on one of the walls (the wall slightly beyond Larry and Sergey's office, for those who have been there), and sure enough Larry, Steve Jobs, and some other guys walk on right by me. When you're big enough to have people like Steve Jobs walking around your halls... some doors open up that simply aren't open to most start ups and companies.
The thing is though that the company is really laid back. I was eating lunch one day with my team and there was an open seat. Sergey Brin came over and asked if he could eat with us. Another time it happened during TGIF, and we just sat around and drank beers. At a different TGIF I drank beers with Alex Martelli and we talked about some of the Python books he's written and how he got into hacking on Python. TGIF, in case you didn't know, is a weekly meeting that the entire company has. Every Friday the company gets together, Larry and Sergey get up and talk about what Google has done during the past week and then the floor opens up for Googlers to criticize the company, recommend things they can do better, or show appreciation for things well done. Read that again... Every week the company gets together as a whole and does a self-analysis. Any issues that are brought up will be resolved by the next Friday. When Google does something stupid, it's addressed and fixed in under a week. Most companies have a meeting once a year, and there is no self-analysis going on. After the self-analysis is done, Google has beer, food, and often live music. The company just kicks back, relaxes, and bullshits over beer. They do this every week.
As for people that haven't yet made a name for themselves... Google will give you the opportunity to. I was there for two weeks before I was running distributed programs across thousands of machines (prior to being there I had never even done serious multi-threaded programming, yet alone distributed computing). I had a copy of the Internet on one of our teams shares that I would run tests and experiments against. Yea, you read that right, a copy of the Internet (text-only). You are effectively given unlimited resources to do whatever you want. Money is never an issue, only brain power is ever in short supply. You'll never be given hard deadlines, you'll never even really be told what to work on... everything is more of a suggestion. You can find a bug, fix it, and push it live in under 4 hours (I've seen this done) and no one will stop you. If you ever get bored and want to join a different team... your desk and items will be moved to that team within 24 hours (assuming that team can take you on). Engineers are viewed as stem cells... if everyone is brilliant than anyone can learn to fill any role, and they do.
The teams bond really well. No one eats lunch alone, you always eat with your team. All the food is free, so you don't have people packing lunches, and all the food is delicious, so you don't have people leaving campus for lunch. Whenever there was a big blockbuster movie(like Transformers when I was there), Google would buy out the local theaters on opening day and take the company to see them. They made sure that you were having fun, and they made sure that you had time to interact with your team in non-professional settings.
Also, everyone in the company is at your disposal to help. The organization is nearly flat, but it doesn't matter... you'll never see someone say "I'm the Director of Blah", everyone always just uses the title "Software Engineer". It's quite a sensation. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what it's like working there. It is truly quite difficult to explain to someone who's never been there.
All that said, it's not perfect and there are lots of sore spots (especially as they keep growing). I won't get into them though simply because this is already long winded enough.
Aw man, I wish I'd joined as an engineer now. The lens I'm seeing the company through (product management) isn't half so cool. I mean, a lot of the above is still true, but we definitely have deadlines, tasks, responsibilities, and the team doesn't seem to eat together all that much. Obviously teams vary though, and this one has been thrown together fairly recently from a very disparate set of people, so that cohesiveness and flexibility isn't really there I guess. Despite all that, it's still pretty awesome.
All that brilliant work, will just end up making Sergey and Larry even more rich.
Google seems like a great enviroment to learn, but at some point reality bites. Your 130k salary wont buy even a decent two bedroom around mountain view.
1 You either have a wife that makes 6figs, so with a combined salary can afford a two-three bedroom house, + schooling for kids.
2. Try to make it big. That at google aint gonna happen. Maybe you will get an extra 30k, for your extra work, but that's it. In comparison, a 7th year lawyer in a top firm, makes easy 260-300k.
I'd personally never work at google (prefer smaller companies) but that kind of work environment is definitely something I respect and hope, someday, to emulate in my own company.
Do policy issues such as "how to deal with China" get discussed in the TGIFs or e-mail lists? I would imagine that such discussions might become very long-winded and very prone to flame wars very quickly.
Yes, they certainly do. In the TGIF presentation itself there isn't too much back-and-forth (although the panel members may have different opinions), but people will discuss it themselves after. For something as big as the China issue, it was probably discussed in some other channel(s) as well.
As far as email lists go, the discussions can get quite lively, although I wouldn't generally call them flame wars - civility still holds in general. But they can definitely get long; the term centithread gets thrown around a lot. When I was there one of the longest I saw was about people putting open chocolate milk back in the fridge, and whether or not that was a terrible thing to do :p..
Yea, they can video conference in. There is also a web based system for asking Larry & Sergey questions. The large majority of Google's engineering force is in Mountain View though. If you ever do work at Google, go to Mountain View... all of the other campuses get similar perks, but Mountain View gets the best.
We're allowed to talk about the smart people. The big deals are what those smart people have set up. That includes the actual scale of the problems we face, the technologies we have, the way development is organized, the way that overall work is organized, and how well the whole package works.
Of course I can't say anything specific about any of that because Google rightly views a lot of it as key competitive advantages. Which is why descriptions like mine about the experience of being at Google focus so much on the areas we are allowed to talk about. Like food and dogs and smart people.
Do you think entrepreneurs would be happy there? After all, many compelling ideas would not fair well with Google's data-driven evaluation (at least in the short term).
There are a bunch of ex-entrepreneurs there, including myself. I think their happiness and success depends upon whether their entrepreneurial ideas align with the sorts of projects that Google would be good at, or whether they're better off striking out on their own again.
And even if you itch to strike out on your own, google is a great place to learn a lot of crazy stuff from a lot of crazy smart people-that's certainly a big part of why i'm here.
I think Google tries to use data-driven evaluation as a way to try to minimize the risk of failure seen in many startups. This has a downside too (beyond what I think you are thinking of). Lots of ideas actualize, and though they don't die, they also don't really go anywhere...witness the various non-monetizing products google has out there with fairly minimal user communities -- particularly against the competition.
Once nice thing about Google is the famed 20% time. If you have an idea, you're allowed to work on it roughly one day a week (or almost one week per month). You might hear some people say that it's a myth, or that it's too hard to actually use it. But if you can't manage to exercise a perk that everyone knows about, and that is sanctioned at the highest level, then it probably means you wouldn't have too much luck with your idea outside of Google either, IMO.
It's just a matter of psychology. You still have friends outside the company... but you can't talk about what you're doing. You can't even talk about the perks without becoming deeply annoying. You can't talk about the scale without giving away competitive information, or sounding like you're bragging. So at some level, when it comes to your work life, you start putting up a mask to everyone else, and your only true confidants have to be other Googlers.
However the part that I'm objecting to is By the time you've reached (3) you've come to believe that Google is years ahead of anyone else; you've transferred all loyalties to the company; you accept the idea that you're in an elite of humanity. I have a lot of loyalties outside of Google, and recognize a lot of talent that isn't there. (Some of whom I'd like to get there, but that is another story.) There are also a lot of kinds of valuable talent which I don't think are even particularly well represented at Google.
One thing I'd like to know about is how google deals with declines in productivity. Undoubtedly, their hiring process gets them highly qualified individuals, at least initially. But over time, there has to be people who become lazy and take advantage of their good graces. And it would be expected that as people age they start a family and their work priorities may take a back seat.
Is there some kind of process, ala Jack Welch, where people are ranked and the bottom 10% are removed? How does google deal with under-performers?
It's the same as pretty much any big company - underperformers are notified that they're underperforming, put on a performance improvement plan to help improve their performance, and if they still don't improve, they're fired.
There're no quotas for removing people (good riddance, the "fire the bottom 10%" school of management always struck me as the best way to create a poisonous, stressful company culture). But it's usually blatantly obvious who the underperformers are...they're the folks who haven't accomplished anything over the last 6 months...
> It's the same as pretty much any big company - underperformers are notified that they're underperforming, put on a performance improvement plan to help improve their performance, and if they still don't improve, they're fired.
On the teams I was on, this was true in theory but not in practice. There were a few weak performers. If they were mediocre, they slipped by unnoticed; if they were really bad, they would get a ton of performance improvement meetings, second chances, etc, and firing was put off for as long as possible. Not sure if this was due to legal fears or what, but it was my anecdotal experience over 3 years.
To be honest, what difference does it make? It may sound cruel, but why not just fire someone if they are not performing (given adequate time to improve, etc...).
Please treat this as a genuine question - as someone who has only started working a few years ago and never had a management position, I feel my view is correct but am open to learning if/why I'm wrong.
You are correct. It doesn't matter, if someone is getting nothing done you can fire them unless their performance is due to a medical issue. I was referring to the people who get very little done.
Other companies would love to hire only Google caliber employees but there isn't enough people to hire. So you end up with a company that may have a few superstars and a lot of average programmers. If a superstar slacked off they would have the same productivity as the average coders. It is hard for a manager to complain to that superstar when his productivity is just as good as many of his peers. At Google the slacker would stand out because his peers are all superstars and get A LOT done.
Google has amazing people. It is often said that engineers find working at Google a humbling experience. This is absolutely true. It took me less than a day to realize that the guy sitting next to me is clearly much smarter than I am [..] without false modesty I wouldn't be surprised to find that I'm as high as being in the top 0.1% in general intelligence (however that could be measured).
This strikes me as a problem, rather than an achievement. Google seems to be jam packed with highly intelligent eggheads, but Google isn't a pure science company - they're trying to work with consumers too. Most of the most successful businessmen and entrepreneurs I know don't come even close to the top 1% of intelligence (and are often even dyslexic) as they need a wider range of faculties like common-sense, charisma, creativity, and "emotional intelligence."
Maybe this guy's in the engineering department and Google does hire a lot of creatives, business types, and what not, but their products have a rather sterile edge that makes me think the engineers always win over there..
Google believes in data only. Designers are not used to justifying their ideas with data.
While no one comes out and says it, the implication is that most of what constitutes the design profession is mere flimflammery. You don't need a designer to tell you what shade of blue to pick when you can just A/B test a few hundred shades.
Bullshit. For example, do you honestly think that Android UI was done in a data-driven way from the scratch without designers?
Google uses data to tweak experience of their existing products like Search UI. That's it. Designing interfaces for new products or features is done by designers (or in some case, like many Google Labs products, by developers).
You're right, I should have qualified that. That said, there are a lot of people working as designers in Google, but in my experience they are essentially user interaction designers.
The more woolly aspects of design -- like picking a different font just because of how it "feels" -- Google's pretty hostile to that. There's a default concept of "Googliness" which everyone understands to be a kind of high-energy, primary-color blandness with near-magical UI. There aren't a lot of projects that deviate from that, no matter what the designer thinks.
If you compare it to the kind of design variety you see at Yahoo or even Microsoft you'll see what I mean. At Yahoo a lot of projects are almost led by design, for good (Flickr) or ill (almost everything else). And there are design principles of Flickr which Google could never accept, like "serendipity". The idea that a user interface could be deliberately not laser-efficient, in the name of promoting exploration and community engagement, would totally baffle Google managers and they wouldn't tolerate that kind of designer-talk.
Heaven forfend one should use an attractive font on a Google product.
Seeing the incredible engineering innovations going on at Google, and the incredible UI innovations going on elsewhere, makes me a little sad - never the twain shall meet, and instead they're redeemed to making shallow copies of each other and never quite hitting the spot. Over-designed and under-engineered, or vice versa.
Adding design-led products or hiring more designers, however, would kind of change what Google is about IMO. Can engineers be taught design? ;)
Have you ever considered that maybe designers have created a culture that is not quite congruent with reality, and that their perception of a good interface is not, in fact, always a good interface?
Engineers like the Google style, but so do lots of my acquaintances who are non-engineers, from scientists to writers to school teachers.
Designers seem to be the only demographic with a problem.
I agree sorta, but only for the more tweaky visual design aspects, rather than interaction design.
If anything, I see Google as actually less data-driven in its design than many areas. Industrial psychology and HCI are traditionally very big on data-driven design for interaction design, with a big focus on Methodologies, quantitative measurement of task performance improvement, and various other statistical evaluation metrics. But the main downside of that is that you can't really answer open-ended design questions: you can A/B test between two specific proposed interfaces, and determine A causes N% of users X quantity less hassle than B does (or whatever your metric is), but if you want to invent an entire new interface, you're basically doing a random walk in design space, which will take a really long time to get anywhere. I mean, imagine how many A/B questions you'd have to ask to invent the Gmail interface, using, say, the Hotmail interface as your starting point, and having to justify every change you make from that starting point using data.
I suppose it depends on your norm, though--- Google is very data-driven by the web-design standard, but sort of loosey-goosey, anything-goes compared to the much more statistics-and-methodology-heavy design practices that go on in traditional engineering and HCI.
The focus is on engineers. Google seems to hire people with exactly the qualities you mention to work directly with the consumers, and leave the hyper-genius engineers where they prefer, away from real people ;) Although there is an element of intelligence and also of having a technical background for many of the consumer-facing roles too.
No, not meaning that at all. Claiming anyone not in the top 1% is "stupid" is ridiculous. A lack of indexable intelligence and "stupidity" might correlate, but are not linked. "Smarts" != intelligence.
While I enjoyed the article, and I appreciate you posting it, one quibble: it's off-putting whenever anyone mentions a number they got on a test as evidence for intelligence. If you write intelligently, I'll happily consider you intelligent.
I normally don't do that. However for perspective I really wanted to give an idea of how intelligent I consider myself to be, and giving that relatively objective number sounded like the least assholish way I had to convey that to people who don't know me.
You'll note that immediately upon giving the number I pointed out that there are issues with that method of measurement and gave an honest self-assessment whose upper range was well below what the number said.
That's a fairly common thing to do though. "My IQ is 200, but I don't believe in IQ tests. By the way did I mention my IQ was 200?"
(Joking aside, I think you conveyed it pretty well, though I have no real clue what a GRE score of nearly 20 years ago means relatively speaking, or how you can convert it into a measure of intelligence at all...)
I could create a conversion calculator and it'd still be pretty meaningless. I just don't really understand how you can draw a direct comparison - it's not like the tests are that similar, although there is some overlap, and even using percentile of people taking the GRE is presumably pandering slightly to the fact it's a self-selecting audience and therefore not necessarily a bell curve, etc. I don't know, perhaps there are real proper studies on this to satisfy the lack of real science that's niggling me here, but given the grey area of 'measuring intelligence' I don't know how well-founded any of those are either.
Add to that the fact that things change as you age - I scored jolly well on an IQ test when I was 14, which gives me a nice score to slap down posturing pseudo-intellectual guys who like to compare mental dicksize at parties, but I'm well aware that I'd score nowhere near that now. I don't know. As I say, I think you brought it up well, I just don't quite see the relevance.
(Weirdly, though, converting the GRE score I got when I was 21 on that calculator results in almost exactly the IQ score I got when I was 14; perhaps there is something to it..!)
2340 on the calculator puts you at the 100th percentile, and at about 2100 on the pre-95 SAT (which only went up to 1600). You sure this has the right version of the score?
"The closest thing that I have to an estimate for my IQ is scoring 2340 on the GRE exam in 1991. Based on conversions that I've seen, that puts me at about the top 0.01% in IQ. Now I was really "on" that day, happen to believe that there are problems with the measurement of intelligence by an IQ test (a subject which I may devote a future blog post to), but without false modesty I wouldn't be surprised to find that I'm as high as being in the top 0.1% in general intelligence (however that could be measured)."
I see you got snarky replies for writing this. But I'm glad you did. I look forward to seeing you post somewhere, with discussion of the post here on HN, about the issues with IQ tests.
Anyone else who likes to discuss the issue of what to think about IQ tests is someone whose thoughts I'd like to read on a new thread
While I don't doubt your smart, I distrust the use of GRE scores for that. I got a 2280 on mine, which isn't too bad, but I had a lot of friends who were significantly smarter than me but didn't do quite as well on the test. At that point, I realized, it was dangerous to correlate GRE (or SAT for that matter) scores with IQ.
Given the design of the GRE, SAT, and standard IQ tests, correlating them with each other is actually on safer ground than correlating any with intelligence.
Actually thinking of intelligence as a one-dimensional thing is dangerous in and of itself.
I'm surprised you don't know your own IQ score. I couldn't even make it to middle-school without having undergone a battery of at least a half-dozen IQ and aptitude evaluations. By the time I made it out of High School I knew probably more than any person should know about their own intelligence and had a pretty clear idea of the range my IQ would fall into as well as my learning styles, cognitive strengths and weaknesses, perceptual processes, learning disabilities, talents and gifts and aptitude scores on at least 3 standardized exams, and various other cognitive measures.
Where I grew up in Canada we didn't bother with all of that.
The SATs and GREs are the only standardized tests I've taken. And I only took those because I was considering going to US schools.
If you're curious, on the SATs I got 1300. (For the younger people in the audience, the SATs were rescaled, that score was a lot better then than it would be now.) I believe that I'd have done better if I wasn't sick that day. Having to get up between sections to go vomit in the bathroom is not exactly good for your concentration...
It may sound crazy after my previous comment, but I never took the SATs or GREs, GMATs etc. I managed to slip through schooling using a couple loopholes and skip the entrance exams all the way to my M.S.
I had all that same testing, but my parents would not tell me my scores.
PS: I was classified as Exceptionally Gifted / Learning Disabled and I am perfectly happy to leave it as that. In theory I could take another IQ test, but I think I am a little old to focus on my potential. IMO, your potential is only important when you have yet to accomplish anything.
Your parents probably did the right thing. I fretted over my scoring through most of school. It's only now, many years later that I realize how irrelevant those scores are to what I need to do.
The only thing I really wish is that my parents, and the various school administrations had ignored the tests too, because they usually resulted in all kinds of "special programs" that did very little to help me deal with school and adolescence and had negligible impact if any on me when I got older.
Having read this article, numerous other articles, heard from Google Employees in large and small settings, and knowing a few Google Interns, I can say one thing with absolute confidence.
Google Engineers know that they're the best engineers, ever.
I've always found it offputting, but maybe I'm just jealous or something.
edit: Worth adding that this is a common thing among many engineers. Also, I know and like a number of Google interns (and engineers). All that said though, the one expression I've heard more than anything else is "Google hires smart people".
There're a bunch of ex-games-programmers at Google. One of my interviewers used to do 3D shooters and stuff before she came to Google. And Amit Patel, the co-creator of "Don't be evil" and one of the initial architects behind AdWords, runs a pretty popular game programming website.
Ok, that's a bit harsh perhaps. In its favor it was a decent idea to merge social gaming and the web, perhaps a bit ahead of its time. I could easily see 3D elements as commonplace on the web in 2012 or so.
The truth is that people don't improve unless they can find shortcomings in themselves that can be improved upon. Which means that good people usually have no problem identifying people who are better at some things than they are. In my experience most have no trouble listing people who are simply better than they are.
So sure, I believe I'm pretty good. But am I as good as any of Robert Morris, Damian Conway or Alan Kay? Of course not, and I'd be an idiot to think otherwise.
I think it's safe to say that you guys think, at a company-wide level, that you're smarter, on average, than any other Software Company (I hesitate to suggest that Google is merely a Software company, but failed to come up with a better way of putting it) around. That's kind of what I was driving at with what I said before, and I apologize if it came off at all snarky or anything.
However, I think it's only fair to add that, in my interactions with "Googlers" in other situations (i.e. not recruitment) have been really fantastic. Namely, I'd say that the Chromium guys have been amazing, and they're making it a joy to try to get involved (related to a school project out of the scope of this conversation).
In short, I'd be more swayed by the recruiters (who are often engineers) if I felt like they weren't just trying to intimidate me with Google's prestige all the time. We know already :)
Why should that be off-putting? Standardized tests are pretty much the only way to objectively measure intelligence. Writing ability doesn't capture stuff like mathematical skill.
Yes, yes, tests are imperfect. Everyone understands this. But they're the best measurement we have -- short of getting to know someone over the course of a few months or years.
Also, tests, because of the way they establish some people as "better" than others, can be very bad for maintaining social harmony. But social harmony isn't a good reason to beat around the bush when one's intelligence is essential to the conversation. People should accept reality.
Edit: And, no, I'm saying this because I have a super-genius level iq. I don't.
I dunno about others but when I read it sounded a little arrogant.
For example, I have a Mensa gold certificate saying that I scored in the top 0.5% percentile on a test (actual IQ scores vary based on the type of test but mine was 143.5).
Sounds pretty arrogant, eh?
Generally any statement that equates to "I am intelligent" gets taken this way.
I think IQ tests sound arrogant because they are always given as rank in the population, rather than in absolute terms. "I can recognize any of 9 fundamental patterns in less than 10 seconds, perform 0.3 FLOPS and know the 10 most common heuristics for beating IQ test problems" doesn't sound nearly as arrogant in my opinion.
Once in college, I was meeting with my advisor, who was also the department head. He had all my school records, including my test scores. He said something about me qualifying to join Mensa if I wanted, and I said something about not liking Mensa since everyone I'd met who had been in the organization seemed arrogant.
It was only later that I realized he must have been in Mensa himself and was recruiting me.
Proving I wasn't nearly as smart as my test scores indicated.
My initial reaction was "Mensa?! Are they still around?". So I head over to http://www.mensa.org/ ...
If there are any Mensa members reading this, you really need to update your website if you want to be taken seriously. OnMouseOver/OnMouseOut makes it look like you're stuck in 1998.
"You are expected to. . . solve problems . . . Usually by email. The result is an organization which is in a constant state of flux . . . With . . . very large volumes of email."
So now we understand Google Wave - they built it for themselves!
My father's pushing 60 and still working those hours, in IT. If you're going to be working those hours, you might as well spend it with smart people, get paid well, and have free food while you're at it.
I am blown away by some of the stuff Google puts out, I can only imagine what their internal technologies and tools must look like.
To me, that more than anything validates their approach to hiring, development and business strategy, of which I would otherwise be very sceptical.
I'd never get hired at Google, and rightly so; I look at some of their stuff and know that I could never do that. I used to think (not without some scornful resentment) that they were elitist snobs, but you just can't argue with their results.
I think that you can. To date, Google really only has one successful product (success meaning "makes money for Google") and that's Ad-sense.
Sure it's wildly successful. But if that stopped making money for Google tomorrow (for example, I automatically mentally filter out all advertisements in my search results, how long before everybody does that), what would their revenue and profitability picture look like? In almost every other product area outside of web search and perhaps email, where Google competes against another company, they haven't done well at all -- both in terms of users and in terms of dollars.
In other words, Google's first product, designed by a couple of grad students, is the loss leader that drives people to their one and only money making product that supplies 99% (not 30%, or 60% or even 80%, 99%!) of their operating capital.
AdWords, not AdSense. AdSense is their second successful product.
And Search exists basically to supply inventory for AdWords. They wouldn't have anything to run ads on without search (okay, not quite true, there's AdSense, but they wouldn't have developed either...)
But yeah, that merely proves my point. If click-throughs started to drop, what other money making products does Google have in its portfolio?
(don't get me wrong, I love and use Google products as much as the next fella, but I also understand that their search/ad revenue is what's subsidizing my use of Google Earth or Picassa or whatever)
Well, it's not hard to just go through the list of products Google offers, and subtract the ones that don't have a business model around them.
For example, Google Earth does some actual business business, and probably makes a bit of cash selling pro versions and geospatial servers and services (haven't looked at the 10-k to be honest). Orkut, Sites, Knol, Chat, Wave, Scholar, etc. does not.
Some things like SketchUp are designed as loss leaders like Search to provide content to things that might have a decent revenue stream like Google Earth (except most of the paying users are probably not using the Sketchup Data).
But other, more expensive things like Chrome and Android have a link to making money that's very tenuous at best.
And we also already know that Search Ads account for 99% of Google's revenue stream. Subtract that out and we have a very good idea of where Google's other offerings are.
A lot of that is because Google doesn't define success that way. Their view is that anything that stimulates the internet will indirectly benefit them, so that makes products like gmail or chrome clear winners. Gmail brought us threaded emailing, ajax (and good javascript-supported interfaces in general), etc. Chrome brought us tear off tabs, fast javascript execution, etc. I think if the focus was stand alone profit generators the products they put out would be very different - what would Android look like?
*brought us = made popular, not necessarily invented.
Although I mentioned business strategy, by 'blown away' I mostly mean engineering enginuity.
But as far as business is concerned, they are still in a good spot, what with basically owning the internet, even though they haven't monetized it much.
It is fairly obvious that they care more about engineering solutions, with monetization as an afterthought. This means their solutions are extremely dominant in many fields (maps anyone?) - turning that into revenue at some point seems inevitable.
> turning that into revenue at some point seems inevitable.
A true statement, they at least have the foundational technologies for doing better, but so far all of the profitable business ideas seem to center around advertising (youtube anyone?). I'm just not sure how much further that idea can stretch...do I really want to see advertisements while building my house in Sketchup?
This is correct, but it's not that the other ventures are all losers. It's that AdWords is this supernova that outshines the entire galaxy.
Gmail, Google Enterprise, Google Docs, Google Apps, Google Checkout, Google Earth, Google Maps -- these would all be highly interesting startups, some of them profitable, were they not inside Google. As it is, now they are more part of Google's long-term strategic plans.
I think one thing that people definitely forget is that many of those were startups at one time. Lots of the peripheral technology offerings Google has were not developed originally in-house -- they were acquired with ad-revenue from their flagship.
And as I posted in another comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093455), outside of Apps for business, really don't make any money for anybody. A quick analysis shows that subtract search/ad revenue and Google Apps for business, and all other offerings have to fit within about $100mil/yr revenue stream. This makes me think that most of the acquisitions have failed to grow much since being purchased.
Again, Google may be full of smart people, and I love using Google products, but money makers they are not.
You're missing something obvious. When Google buys something they tend to put ads on it and let people use it for free. That means that any revenue that web property brings in is counted as ad revenue, and is not counted as coming from that web property. Therefore looking at the SEC statement gives you no way to figure out how much revenue Google is or is not getting from a lot of their acquisitions.
That's true I suppose. But it still means that any products and services Google actually sells still accounts for about $200mil/yr and about $100mil/yr of that is purely Google Apps for businesses.
That means,
Google Earth Enterprise Geospatial Servers + Google Earth Pro + Google Products/Checkout (minus advertising revenue from that) + Google Appliances + Google Sketchup Pro + More Picassa Space + Google Voice long distance service fees + whatever else all account for $100mil/yr in revenue. Those aren't ad supported services and nearly all of those were acquisitions.
Google Appliances should be a multi-billion dollar/yr business, supplanting everything from document and content management systems, to Sharepoint, to many types of traditional Oracle installations, yet we know that it's entire business sits at under $100mil/yr. Let's be generous, and in a flight of fancy say it sits at $90mil/yr, that means that all the rest of those products would have to do less than $10mil/yr.
Too much you say! Google voice Long Distance has to do something in the neighborhood of $5mil/yr! And I know personally of at least a dozen or so Google Earth Enterprise Server Installs, at ~$20k a pop (or whatever the pricing is), that's not a whole lot of money. ESRI has a similar business at just under $.75 billion/yr. Assuming there are quite a few more installs than I personally know about, let's say all added up, $2mil/yr in geospatial products (that's about 10x the value of what I've personally seen so I feel I'm being pretty generous here). So the Appliance business couldn't possibly be that "big".
In other words, no matter how you mix the numbers, the performance of these offerings is not very good. I'm currently working in a startup, and we're doing numbers like this and we're considered very under-performing by our investors right now. It would rankle me in all kinds of ways were I in google management that these products are not each at least $20-30mil/yr interests and one or two of them should be $billion+/yr interests.
Again, don't get me wrong, I love Google and their products and services. I probably use most of what I just listed here at least 2-3x a week. But Google is an advertising agency that uses a novel distribution channel for it's advertising clients. It's not really much of a products company in the same way Microsoft of Apple is. Google should be analyzed more in terms of comparison to other ad channels and agencies not in terms of direct competition with technology vendors. This is the flaw analysts, users, employees and competitors make.
99% of Google's reported revenue comes from search (or rather advertising programs) according to their 2008 company report (I know a little outdated, the number is probably a bit different now but I can't be bothered to look it up, I'd guess still pretty north of 90%).
Doing some quick arithmetic gives me about $200 million left over from all other products and services combined.
Google Apps for business accounts for around $100 million of that (2 million users * $50/yr), which means that really, all other products in Google make up around $100 million dollars/year. I'm willing to wager that a very significant chunk of that remaining $100mil comes from Google Earth geospatial servers for the military and the rest going to the appliances (which surprisingly are not the big hit everybody thought they would be, the appliances should be a multi-billion/yr business unit alone, what went wrong?).
Now, $200+ million is nothing to sneeze at, but we wouldn't talk about Google with such hushed, excited, reverence if they were a $100 or $200 million/yr company, would we? Salesforce.com, which basically sells one thing, just did a Billion dollar year. We also have no idea if those figures represent profit or not. Google docs for example runs on the same multi-billion dollar infrastructure as does search...would it be nearly as compelling of a service if it really had to pay for itself?
We all conflate their great technology with their market success, but really Google is just a really good advertising conduit that just so happens to have really good technology -- their other technology is not impactful in nearly the same way monetarily to them.
By way of comparison, Google is about the same revenue-size as the top-5 advertising agencies.
But Google's actual technology business is about the size of ClickSoftware Technologies(NASDAQ:CKSW) -- and I don't recall seeing lots of posts on any tech site about their offerings.
None of this is any great mystery. The numbers are out there and it's easy to make some educated guesses. Google knows this too, which is why they are rapidly trying to diversify into other areas. For example, Google Docs was a $0/yr business not that long ago -- I wish I could turn a switch and grow something into a $100mil/yr operation in a couple of years.
On the other hand, if we look at Microsoft, they aren't even interested in an idea unless it has at least a billion/yr revenue opportunity attached to it. So many of the things that Google is doing now, to build up to, and exceed, that kind of revenue target, would never have happened at Microsoft -- and there's something to be said about that.
True, but I always hear lots of talk about the group you are with. "My team eats together all the time." That kind of thing. From food on up the pyramid, Google consciously tries to provide something to provide something for each level.
Here's a question, and I don't mean this in a snarky way at all. It's a genuine question.
With all these smart people, why has the experience of google search not improved substantially over the last 10 years? Sure, there's more little geegaws in search now, but the experience of finding what I want hasn't gotten any easier.
What are some of the tasks you've had a bad experience with?
I work in Google Search, and we actively try to identify areas that people are having difficulty with and then come up with ways to make their search experience better. Unfortunately, most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. If we knew precisely where the pain points were, we'd be much better able to solve them.
I think one of the biggest problems is the insane level of reliance Google now has for domain authority.
It feels like a cheap cop-out for controlling spam: the side effect is that you have heavy hitters like Maholo, Target, etc... all out spamming the more relevant websites.
A more general example of this algorithm problem is that it ranks the pages of Digg, HN, or similar to be higher than the actual website it links to, and most of the times those pages are devoid of any actual content, merely containing a couple of votes and no comments.
One big annoyance: 10 years ago, when I searched for a snippet of song lyrics, I got a fan site for the band that accurately transcribed the lyrics. Now I get nothing but pages and pages of shady sites selling me ringtones, with inaccurate lyrics, even when I know there are fansites for the band with better lyrics.
A guess is that this is the result of the reliance on domain names for ranking. The high-quality lyrics are distributed across millions of separate domain names, since fansites typically are dedicated to only one band. The low-quality, ring-tones-heavy lyrics sites, though, are centralized, with every band's lyrics on the same domain.
As a bit of a followup: an even worse case (i.e. less likely to get a nice, fan-created lyrics page as one of the first-page hits) is when I know the name of the song and google for something like: joy division warsaw lyrics.
What I actually get are a bunch of sites with names like mp3lyrics, songlyrics, musicsonglyrics. It might be that the word "lyrics" in my query is boosting that sort of stuff to the top? From what I can tell, Google also penalizes old / rarely updated sites, which probably hurts these kinds of pages--- the page linked above was last updated in 2007, but it's still the best result for that query.
Good point, and probably symptomatic of a wider problem. Sites with a ton of "good enough" information will outrank sites with a very specific set of "excellent" information. The high ranking of wikipedia and the various answers sites is a similar effect.
Would you mind if I followed up with you later on that? I'd like to organize my thoughts on how it could be better for me.
I was thinking I could email you at the address in your profile, but when I think about it, it might be more productive to post a Ask HN here once I have a better explanation of what I mean. Then the whole community could participate, which seems like it would be constructive.
Sure, go for it, and I think an Ask HN would be appropriate as long as it's kept constructive and doesn't devolve into a bitchfest of complaining. I have faith in the HN community. :-)
Also, to be clear, I'm speaking in an unofficial capacity here, as myself. I'm quite curious what people's frustrations are, but I can't promise anything.
webspam. Search for 1935 buick and get back dozens of sites that have "OEM fuel injectors for your 1935 buick" or "OEM stereo for your 1935 buick", etc, etc.
When I just searched for [1935 buick], the results looked pretty good. The first hit was for the Old Car Manual Project, the second was for HowStuffWorks, the third was "1935 Buick Series 40 Images, Information, and History". I didn't see any OEM links.
When you do find a lot of spam, does Show Options -> Fewer Shopping Sites help?
My personal experience of search got a lot better when they started suppressing mirrored content. For me to go back to what they had 10 years ago would be painful. Another improvement that I like is the ability to use search to find stuff on a particular site.
I would assume that for most people, the experience of search is easy and is working well. Otherwise I don't think it would continue to be #1. It sounds like you might be outside the norm.
The fact that they're #1 just means they're the best of the available options. It doesn't mean the experience is great, just better than what else is out there.
This leads to another point of interest. How astoundingly complex the company is. I believe that organizations naturally evolve until they are as complex as the people in them can handle. Well Google is tackling really big, complex problems, and is full of people who can handle a lot of complexity.
What do you mean the company is complex?
It's not clear to me why solving difficult problems merits organizational or operational complexity.
Try to build something that deals with the amount of data that Google has, as quickly as Google handles it, with everything distributed, replicated, load balanced, and with failover to keep the site up when bad things happen anywhere in the system. (Which happens more often than we would like.)
Before you're done you'll have built a lot of pieces of software that do different things that have complex little dependencies on each other.
Now iterate that through many generations of development, and build some other systems that tackle similar problems.
Do that and you'll discover why Google's infrastructure is complex.
Quick, slightly off-topic question. There's a belief in the industry (I think wrongly) that pretty much the only way to build big complex systems, you need a central "Enterprise Architect" to model all the business processes and use those to drive down to the technology.
As somebody external to Google, it seems to me that this approach largely does not exist at Google (or if it does, it exists only for particular isolated pieces). Is this true? Or rather? What's Google's method for containing, directing and handling this complexity if it's not a traditional EA thinking process?
So I'm generally fine with Google as a great company until I deal with SEO people (i.e. the recent Mahalo discussion here). If you're all so great, why do we have to deal with so much pollution on the web?
What are the combined resources thrown at gaming Google's search results? What are the combined resources thrown at preventing people from gaming Google's search results? The webspam team is big and staffed with some incredibly intelligent people, but there are probably millions of people out there that are all trying to figure out how to rank highly in search results.
It's a reasonable counter-argument, but I don't buy it.
1. All those millions of people are competing against each other - many of them will cancel each other out.
2. It doesn't seem at all like google can't control spam, but that given well-funded companies (ideally from California) they look the other way. It seems less like a lack of resources and more like a lack of integrity.
If you know someone that works there, tell them you might be interested and ask them to take you to lunch. They'll be happy to as we're trying to find more people. The Irvine office just had an open house. It was the first time we've done one and I don't know of any more scheduled, but if anyone's in the area I'd be happy to let you know if we have another in the future. If those aren't options, then just apply anyway. We always take candidates to lunch when they interview. Worst case is you decide it's not for you and you have to turn down an offer, but I've been very happy there.
Official tours are only for 'official' visitors (and big parties). There's a program to get students visiting if you're in that boat, otherwise, I'm sure a HN Googler would be happy to host you if you're local. What sort of work would you be interested in - engineering? product management?* anything specific within that you'd want to see?
Of course, you do get a nice tour and lunch if you get interviewed :)
Edit: Ha. Somewhat appropriately, were you to have a campus tour of Mountain View around about today, and should you visit a bathroom in that time, you'd see a quote from pg's "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" on the back of the stall door...
In fact this is enshrined as an official corporate policy - engineers get 20% of their time to do with pretty much as they please, and are judged in part on how they use that time. I found a speech claiming that over half of Google's applications started as a 20% project.
>> (I'm surprised that the figure is so low.)
I wonder why you are surprised? Actually it's very high. Imagine Google don't offer 20% for its' employees, will their productivity (in their real jobs) increase? Probably not, you won't work 100% of your time, you'll work 70% or 80% in best cases.
Google profit from this wasted 20% to turn it into useful mini-applications, that can turn big in the future and the best example is Gmail.
Virtually no Google engineers use their personal time to develop new projects. In most cases, they have crushing responsibilities on their existing projects (that guy who appears to be 2x as smart as you and sits next to you? You are competing with him).
Usually, people use the official personal time to take mini-sabbaticals with other projects, or write tools to make their own lives easier (which may have more general use within the company, or beyond.)
"Virtually no Google engineers use their personal time to develop new projects."
I've tried, without success so far, though I've got a bunch of things in the half-done state that could turn into something useful eventually. It is very hard, kinda like starting up a company while keeping your day job.
I've found I had the most success by just trying to get my 80% project out of the way as fast as possible, doing as much as needed to keep my teammates happy, and then banking the remaining time to work on 20% projects. It's best used in chunks of a week or so, so that you can actually finish a lot and have something concrete that can sit and wait for your next big chunk of time.
I only ever hear about the intense scrutiny engineers have to go through (and various quasi-discriminatory practices regarding school pedigree), but say I'm past the "I want to be an engineer" phase of my life and now work squarely in management.
A question for googlers: what's the work-life balance like working over there? If you've worked at any of the other top tech companies, is it any better/worse than your previous gig?
Funny that all these super intelligent people at Google don't understand the need for 'privacy'. Even their boss' public statements about this issue seem to be pretty dumb.
It is marginally related to the article, both being about Google. It isn't fair to say that he was trolling just because half of his comment wasn't discussed in the blog post.
my point is that these people who think their are intelligent, in fact are missing lots of facets from what we call 'intelligence'. From my point of view Google's employees are understanding a lot about technology and little about its social impact. It would help if they would not present them as super smart and act so clueless in so many ways.
I like Google as a company and I love their products (As much as you can love a tool), but jesus how can he work there and use Blogger? It's such a piece of crap.
The answer is that I'm engaging in satisficing behavior, not optimizing behavior.
When I wanted to start a blog it was there and free. I've seen lots of other people use it. And so far it has been good enough for my needs.
If I was a serious blogger I'd likely find things I didn't like about it and look for something better. But until some obvious shortcoming irritates me, it isn't worth the effort for me to find something better.
Ok, so you freely admit that there are (probably) things that are wrong with it if you looked hard enough.
...So why isn't it better?
EDIT TO ADD: You know, this is really part of the bigger problem. Google has a fair amount of side services that just barely scoot by and it's pretty stupid. Example: Google is a search engine company, but their Chrome Extension Search page HAS NO SEARCH FEATURES.
All software could be better. No matter how good it is you can find things to improve about it.
As for Google's software, a lot of people at Google fully agree with the startup idea that you should release something fast then iterate. That means that we release a lot of stuff that (quite deliberately) doesn't have a lot of corporate spit and polish. And things that don't come to our attention as seriously needing improvement are liable to remain unimproved.
If you think that something particularly needs improvement, send feedback.
Responding to "It could probably improve, but I haven't looked closely" with "Why isn't it better?" is nonsensical to me. He just said he hadn't analyzed it - and that he didn't feel the need to.
I like blogger.com. Just yesterday I fired up a blog for my wife's retail clothing store. Now she can do all that stuff herself instead of relying on her custom-programmer husband. :)
I know what you mean, sometimes things can get a little flaky. I haven't tried the comment feature yet. It is after all a big pile of Javascript with WYSIWYG editors and such. So far I have found the bugs slightly annoying, cute, and avoidable.
For my own high-powered purposes I've written a completely custom CMS with fully encrypted and extensible object types based on pure text. But have I written an "object" with a WYSIWYG editor, Labels, Archives, and other stuff built in yet? Heck no. So blogger.com here I come.
I offered advice on gmail that solves complaints I have heard about it in the past from heavy email users. I described a scene of perpetual chaos that plenty of people would hate. And I gave the piece of information that Google is hiring.
Those are three pieces of information that I thought were worthwhile sharing which are definitely not simply "Google is cool".
I thought there were some really interesting tidbits in there and I enjoyed reading about the office environment. About the information that they're hiring - has there ever been a time when Google wasn't hiring? (I mean that seriously, not to be snarky.)
About a year ago Google had a layoff and stopped hiring.
This was personally frustrating, because I got through the interview process in Feb, got approved by the hiring committee, then headcount was not approved. Which put me in a state of indefinite limbo. So I had found a different job by the time they contacted me again in October.
Woah, I really did squeak in under the wire. I got through the interview process in December and started in January. They actually did an end run around Larry Page and had a quorum of other VPs approve my app, because he was on vacation that week and I had another offer I was pretty close to taking.
I wound up in a very different position from what I'd applied for, so they did a phone interview with my potential manager to decide whether I needed to come in for another on site interview.
* Blah-blah, Google is so cool, nothing worth reading, actually.*
Bit like your comment. Hence the downvote.
It is interesting that someone from the outside has now joined Google and found a lot that they would like to say, but can't.
I've also seen anecdotal evidence that the 20% time is largely ignored and up to the employee to push for, but he comments that it's both used a lot and you are marked on it. I guess that varies with where in Google you work.
Sorry, but I can't lie to you. I heard all that Google campus stories a zillion times, except probably for j-k buttons, which are hinted at the bottom of the GMail page, right?
Downvote at will.
You don't have to lie to me/us and pretend you love the post, but HN doesn't need "blah blah zzzz" anymore than you need "another google campus story".
I have a place in my brain that keeps telling me that I could never get hired by Google (not-good-enough), but then the part of my brain that keeps me going replies: "On the Internet, no one knows you're not a Googler."
I've only met two googlers in real life. One past, one present. Both talk about google like its a great place, but both seem slightly spent/burnt from the place.
Agreed. I don't doubt that it's an amazing place to work, but every job has its honeymoon phase and the author is definitely in that.
I'd be eager to hear an honest assessment from him after a year though. There has to be a reason why brilliant and motivated people leave Google, after all.
I've been there for just over a year. My reactions are basically the same as his - they were the same when I started, but they've dulled as I got accustomed to it. Still think it's a great place to work.
The OMG-everyone's-so-smart factor does fade as you get accustomed to all the proprietary infrastructure and realize that hey, I'm smart too. Eventually, intelligence just doesn't matter all that much. It's like my dad's story about starting at MIT: the first 2 weeks, everybody has their phi-beta-kappa rings on all the time. After a month, they've all disappeared, because you realize that everybody else has one too, and then smarts just aren't an issue afterwards.
You also tend to become more overworked as you gain competence. There's far more that we'd like to do than what we can do. Eventually that marveling at "Oh my god we built this" becomes "Oh shit I have to build this", which can be very satisfying, but also is a lot of work.
For honest assessments, probably reviews on glassdoor.com would help.
Blogs are generally going to be positive, as the person's identity is attached to it. Annonymous reviews, has its own problems ofcourse
The people I know who've left have left mainly due to the secrecy this article also talks about: they developed cool algorithms they wanted to publish research papers about, and weren't allowed to.
Regarding the stuff you're not supposed to talk about, there are three stages:
1. Amazement at how it all works; wanting to go run and tell all your friends.
2. Fear that talking about Google's advantages would undermine the company (or your position in it)
3. Recognition that nobody would believe you anyway.
By the time you've reached (3) you've come to believe that Google is years ahead of anyone else; you've transferred all loyalties to the company; you accept the idea that you're in an elite of humanity.
The reality is that while Googlers are very smart, and sometimes not even narrow, a lot of their intellectual qualities are not innate. Mostly it's due to a very severe work ethic and having had the leisure and wealth to pursue a field with single-minded focus since they were in their early teens. And much of this is mere bravado, or habitual oneupmanship learned from Ivy-league American schools. Don't be intimidated, and try not to abandon all your own intellectual standards in favor of Google's.